“Travel is the only thing you buy which makes you richer” – Anonymous. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” – Saint Augustine. All these famous quotes reveal that to travel widely is to truly live and helping us on our journeys are amazing machines like trains, cars, bikes, airplanes, and ships. One of the most popular products of the Industrial Revolution was the steam-driven locomotive. Railways had a major impact on farming as goods such as dairy products could now be moved long distances without becoming rotten. The standard of living of the population improved as a result. During the happening era of railways, huge amounts of industrial output were used for rail construction which was very profitable for …show more content…
It was defined by huge building of railroads, large scale iron and steel manufacture, major use of machinery in manufacturing, increased use of steam power, wide use of telegraph, use of petroleum and beginning of electrification. Railroads allowed cheap and easy movement of materials and products which lead to creation of cheap rails to build more roads. Railroads also got help from supply of cheap coal for their steam locomotives. The increase in steel production from the 1860s onwards meant that rails could be made from steel at a very economic cost. Steel rails lasted 10 times more than iron rails. With the falling prices of steel, heavier-weight rails were used. Railways became the biggest form of transport infrastructure all over the industrialized world leading to a uniform decrease in the cost of shipping worldwide. In America, the Gilded Age was totally based on heavy industries such as railroads, factories and coal mining. The happening event was the grand opening of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1860s, providing a 6-day route between San Francisco and the East Coast. American Railroad tripled between 1860 and 1880, and tripled again by 1920, in the Gilded Age. This lead to usage of new lands for commercial farming …show more content…
The first pneumatic tire was made by John Boyd Dunlop in 1887, which was just at the right time for the development of road transport. The commercial production of tires began in late 1890. Karl Benz, the German inventor, patented the world’s first automobile in 1886, and it was first sold in 1888. An affordable car for the average worker was Ford’s lifelong dream which was fulfilled in 1896, due to the Assembly Line, a revolutionary idea of a factory with special purpose machines and machine tools which were organized in a specific order in the work sequence leading to fast and efficient Mass Production of cars. This was a unique event in history in which a large and very complex product consisting of 5000 parts had been made on a vast scale of hundreds of thousands per year. The massive savings from mass production methods made it possible to sell 2 million T-Fords at $290 each in the year 1924